The Billionaire Trope

By Atlanta screenwriter, actor, and filmmaker, Madison Hatfield.

In 2023, both the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America went on strike. The reasons were too numerous to list here in a piece not really about the strikes (or is it?), but essentially we were protesting the lining of CEO and shareholder pockets through the exploitation of artists — the use of AI, unfair residual models for streaming, shrinking writers rooms, etc. When the strikes ended, the industry returned not with a bang but a whimper: barely any jobs came back at all as Hollywood entered a historic contraction. We’re still in it. And that brings me to the first point of my actual piece (or is it?). In an effort to survive this unprecedented lack of opportunity in my field, I started directing “vertical serialized dramas.” Or, as I lovingly refer to them, “soap opera movies for phones.”

I’m not going to tell you the names of the companies I work for since I’m directing another one of these this month and I don’t want them misinterpreting this as a hit piece (it isn’t). But I’ll be honest, I found these films — this CONTENT — to be a little beneath me. However, my first interview helped me reframe my perspective. The studio representative told me that they were in the business of making stories — CONTENT — for women whose only chance to consume it was in stolen moments of solitude: on the toilet, in a waiting room for an appointment, or maybe on the bus as they went from one job to the next. He argued that these hard-working women all around the world deserved compelling, accessible, and transportive stories just like anybody else. As a lover of storytelling, I had to agree. And I took the job when he offered it.

Entering into this world, many elements of the tales being told were unsurprising. There’s love stories (and lots of sex), hilariously villainous antagonists (step-mothers and ex-girlfriends, usually), dramatic twists and turns as often as possible, and of course a happy ending for the fated lovers. But the trope that was new to me, that shows up in almost every one of these things, is that the man pining for our heroine…is a billionaire. Often she doesn’t know it (we want our leading ladies beating the GOLD DIGGER allegations), but the truth always comes out, and it makes her ultimate victory all the sweeter. Because now she gets to be a billionaire, too. And beyond the love at first sight and mutual orgasms and withering retorts hurled at enemies in the moment (not uselessly thought of in the shower two business days later), THAT is the ultimate fantasy: having enough money to take care of yourself and the people you care about. Enough money to not have to really think about money anymore.

When I think back on that interview and remember who these movies are for, it’s a little dystopian. But at least our industry has the decency to make becoming a billionaire a fantasy. It’s unsettling to see the billionaire trope weasel its way, quite earnestly, into our shared reality. I saw a screenshot of a Facebook message exchange between a liberal acquaintance and his radically conservative young family member. After a slew of racist, homophobic insults, the young man ended his rant with this: “I’ll be a billionaire one day, loser, while you’ll be spinning on your thumb.” While there may be more billionaires than there have ever been (801 according to inequality.org), the vast majority of us are far closer to destitution than we are to a billion dollars. And yet there are political, social, and capitalistic forces convincing people like this young man that such a fate is not only achievable but inevitable…if he votes, acts, and consumes/produces in the correct ways, of course. And seeing that message got my blood running cold for lots of reasons, but one reason felt more specific to me than the others: does my work directing art (CONTENT) that perpetuates a billionaire fantasy actually feed into the same beastly machine that brainwashed this young person?

Spoiler alert: I’m not going to take five more paragraphs to answer this question. I don’t actually think it’s answerable for me. You may have a strong opinion one way or another, and I applaud and envy your certainty. Because I really can’t decide for myself how accountable I can hold this very new kind of storytelling (and myself). I may not even be able to decide how accountable I can hold ANY commercial storytelling. When I dig down into it, the fantasy we are really selling in our soap opera phone movies is safety and peace. We all just want to feel like we’re gonna be okay. We all just want some ease. The companies I work for are selling that fantasy through on-the-nose dramas about billionaires beating up abusive ex-husbands. But I’ve written scripts and worked for companies selling a story about finding safety and ease in your One True Love. There are lots of stories selling safety through guns and hand-to-hand combat acumen. And countless inspirational tales of achieving safety through a good education or a found family or a buried treasure or a scrappy small business or a good dog. All these stories are selling something, and they have to. Because the people behind them—people like me—have rent to pay and groceries to buy. We might tell stories about billionaires, but very few of us in this business are billionaires ourselves. And it’s the same economic violence that forces women to watch their stories on the bus from job to job that makes me say yes to directing the stories they’re watching, even if I’m worried about what those stories have to say.

There was something that felt so new about those strikes in 2023…maybe it was the focus on AI or all the problems that surfaced and festered specifically in the age of streaming. But maybe, at the end of the day, the fight was much older. Stories of all kinds but especially ones we put on film for wide dissemination are inextricably linked to money. And maybe in the beginning, the money served the stories; maybe the money even respected the stories. But as capitalism rages insatiably on, the money respects only itself. And now the stories themselves are about money— how it alone can drive us, how it alone can SAVE us. As I feed that lie with soapy fantasies and more powerful forces feed that lie with policy and propaganda, the greatest comfort I have left is that I can still see it for the lie it is. Others are not so lucky. And I know the stories I’m helping to tell are doing nothing to bring them back from that dark edge. But other stories might. Other stories must. And perhaps our duty as storytellers working under capitalism is to both feed the beast (to survive the moment) and fight the beast (to survive the future). As much as they tempt us to become the beast ourselves—to find our salvation in its nebulous excess—perhaps our greatest duty as writers and artists of any kind is to resist that siren song. We must remember, better than anyone, that money will not save us.

People will.